The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  “Am I pregnant?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?” he asked, a little startled at the sudden possibility of Hannah having a future, after all.

  “I don’t see how I could be, but I thought you might think I was.”

  She explained about the sexual encounter two years before, and Dr. Watt assured her that she couldn’t be pregnant, but that he’d arrange to have her tested to put her mind at rest. After that the future receded once again, they reverted to their regular catechism and Hannah stopped worrying that there might be an answer to his question.

  Hannah had soon become accepted as the baby of the Bin. Pat, especially, took her under her wing, but the other patients too looked out for her. If someone got wildly out of hand, throwing things, or themselves, violently about while Hannah was in the room, another patient would tell them to pull themselves together.

  “Not in front of Hannah,” they’d say. And unless the situation was completely out of control, her presence usually had some calming effect.

  Word got back to her old school that Hannah was in terrible circumstances, scrubbing floors in the workhouse or madhouse, depending who was telling the tale; but the truth was that life at Lady Mary’s was much more interesting than most places a fifteen-year-old might find herself, and, at the same time, rather safer, calmer even, than she was used to. Apart from the fact that she didn’t know how she was ever going to leave, she was not unhappy or frightened in the converted Victorian mansion just up the road from the seafront. She had certainly been both frightened and unhappy for enough of her life before that to know that what she had was asylum in the old, true, sense of the word: a refuge, a breathing space, a place of safety. If this was the place in which everyone said Hannah “would end up” it was by no means the worst she could imagine. Being stuck was not unpleasant, it was downright restful so far as she was concerned. And however much the doctors and nurses might cluck at each other about her continuing presence there, Hannah didn’t mind being in the Bin at all. All she had to do was dance an old-fashioned dance round and round the dayroom.

  Shit and Gold

  For the purposes of the story, I never had a name. I was always just the daughter of a miller, and then later the Queen—meaning Mrs. King. But we millers’ daughters have names, like everyone else, though the archetype-makers would have you think differently, even in a story such as this, where naming names is the name of the game.

  Well, I bloody well had a name and have one still—excuse the language, not suited to a queen, I know, but once a miller’s daughter, always a fucking miller’s daughter, I say. My name, I can reveal, was, and still is, Claraminda Griselda. The first confabulation of a name being an indication of the florid hopes my father had for his own flesh and blood to raise him up above his natural station in life (a hope rather surprisingly granted now that he’s been elevated, as the father of a queen must be, to an earldom); the second name my father once heard in a tale told in the local inn by some accountant fellow called Chaser, or Chooser, or Chancer, or something, who fancied himself as more than just an ordinary customs and excise man. My father, the recently elevated earl, told me he had liked the sound of Griselda, and that the story the taxman told had held out great promise for the bearer of that name, who, though she had her troubles, came out well settled in the end.

  However, not wishing to antagonise the rest of the village children (my father had already alienated us from our neighbours, on account of his comical fantasies and high-falutin ways), I called myself the rather simpler Clary, and even now, though the King has all the pretensions of a miller and insists on having my full name on documents of state, I think of myself as plain Queen Clary.

  I spent my childhood in a miasma of flour dust. No matter how my mother wiped and washed while she lived, it was always possible to write my name with my finger in the film on every surface. Naturally, or rather, unnaturally, my father insisted I went to the village school to learn to read. So while most of my contemporaries were productive elements of their household—carrying water, carding wool, pumping bellows—I sat in school, alone, except for the children of better families than ours, who would not talk to a mere miller’s daughter, learning my letters, and what to do with them. I could not see what such an excess of learning would achieve, apart from being able to write my name on stools and tables and windowsills.

  Of course, the price of his flour reflected the extraordinary expense my father had in the raising of a mere daughter, so we weren’t very popular on that account, either. There were plenty of people who passed through our village with tales of the cost of a sack of flour just a few miles away. I say a few miles, but each one of them might have been a continent for most of the villagers with their broken-down nags and rickety carts. Even then, they would only complete the journey if fortune smiled on them and the brigands kept away. It goes to show—me saying a few miles—the way you get used to a new station in life. What would a dozen miles be to me, with all the resources of the stables and a choice of exquisitely crafted carriages at my disposal? If I ever used them, that is. As for brigands: I should be so lucky.

  So I grew up in a flour-pale house where even our eyelashes were dusted with pulverised wheat and rye, and learned, in readiness for the future in my pompous father’s head, to read. Even now, in my mind’s ear, I can hear his bellowing baritone carrying through the air from the mill beside our cottage.

  I care for nobody

  No, not I—

  And nobody cares for me.

  They were the truest words that ever came from a man’s lips.

  So we weren’t a very popular little family, and I spent a good deal of time on my own. Often, I’d sit in a corner watching my father at work. Not from any admiration of him, but with fascination at the process he carried out. The two great granite grinding stones were turned by two pairs of donkeys at opposite sides of the stones, going round and round very slowly as if once they had tried to catch each other up, but had finally tired out, and realising they never would manage it, had slowed forever down to a dull and hopeless plod. Actually, there was a series of donkeys—they didn’t last long, my father being mean with feed and generous with their work hours. I never cared for them much, they seemed so depressed. What interested me was the process they set and kept in motion.

  My father tipped grain into the hopper and it trickled down, like the sand in the hourglass in my husband, the King’s, counting house, between the great stones which turned, thanks to the will-less motion of the donkeys, and crushed the grain into a gritty powder. I think it was the relentlessness of the process which fascinated me. Round and round, and on and on. Grain in at the top, flour out at the bottom. An endless process for the endless need of the village for bread. Those grinding stones were at the secret heart of all our lives. Whether they liked it or not, the villagers had need of my father and his mill. No one could manage without bread, and those who had fallen on bad times were obliged to go cap in hand to my father and ask for time to pay for the sacks of flour they could not do without.

  He always obliged, but not very obligingly. There are two ways of having people in your debt. You can make it easy, taking the long view that everyone has times of difficulty, but also other times which are not so hard. You treat your debtors as if they were yourself at a different stage of fortune, so that they know when better times come they can take an extra chicken or whatever, and you will rejoice with them in their improved fortune. And there is the other way—my father’s way. Everyone in the village owed him at one time or another, and he never let them forget it. He would mark the names of those who couldn’t pay him on a slate, with exaggerated care, listening with relish to the screech it made. Other people’s hard luck made him feel richer, not just in what they owed him, but in some more mysterious way, as if every degree by which someone else was down pushed him up in his own esteem. “They can’t do without me,” he would say, booming with self-satisfaction. Then he’d burst into the old chorus:

 
I care for nobody

  No, not I—

  And nobody cares for me.

  It was a song of triumph. And although the last line was as true as true could be, it didn’t worry him. It made him feel bigger and more important in some twisted way to know that nobody, including his daughter, did care for him.

  I never had much time for my father, and my mother, for the handful of years I knew her, was too preoccupied with drudgery and not getting on the wrong side of him to make much impact on me beyond pity for her lot. She died very quietly, apparently of nothing more than a lack of will to live. Which was probably the truth. She faded away, as if each day proved that there was little and increasingly less to live for.

  So I was a solitary child. I watched the stones grinding and listened to the rhythm they made as the slight hollows and bumps in the granite altered the pitch. Strraagga graast, scrummm, scrummm. Straagga grasst, scrummm scrummm. It inhabited my dreams, that beat, becoming as much a part of me as my own heart’s rhythm. And I was content in spite of my loveless surroundings. Somehow, the perpetual circling of the stones seemed to me very like the shape and movement of the world itself. The village, bread, work, children, seemed to have a pattern, which I knew, for all the ups and downs of fortune, to be a good, solid, pattern. I felt a rightness about how things were, about all the circles that were drawn by each family and each village with the millstones grinding out the rhythm of being alive. And my father, for all his foolish pomposity and grandiose notions, could not help but provide the certainty as he ground the grain around which life made its circles.

  Only once, while I was growing up, did the circle pattern fail. A blight on the crops, who knew why, one year, and for a while the grinding stones were silenced. There was no grain to mill, and it was as if my own heart had halted, the silence was so ominous. It was, that time, a localised problem, however, and soon enough grain was brought in from the outside world, and the stones began their strraagga graast, scrummm scrummm once again. It was a warning to me, though. That pattern, so close to life itself, was not immutable. The vital circles could be halted. It was a useful lesson to learn.

  Of course, the King was nowhere to be seen during that time of hardship. It was not his way to go abroad among his people unless he was certain of their loyalty and affection. And no one in the village doubted that the King had enough grain stored away to get him through difficult times. However, once the millstones were doing their work, he passed through our village in a grand triumphant ride, as if the return of the stuff of life was his doing. People lifted their heads as he passed, magnificent on his great white horse weighted down with plumes and tapestries. They bobbed a curtsey or bowed their heads briefly, while he nodded graciously at them. No one took much notice. The King was not part of the village life, except inasmuch as he taxed and tithed us. No one hated him, he was too remote, too irrelevant for that. They simply saw him as a fabulous creature passing through their byways.

  Except my father, of course. He bowed and scraped so much that the King thought him his finest subject. He dismounted and demanded to be taken on a tour of his miller’s mill. Oh, my father obliged, with such obsequiousness that I thought I might vomit. I suppose the honour was too much for his miserable mind. At any rate, that is some kind of explanation for what happened next. Faced with the condescending attention of his liege lord, my father entirely lost his head. It was never altogether true that he cared for nobody. For the rich and powerful he cared, it seemed, beyond his own sanity and the wellbeing of us both.

  My father called me to him, hissing out of the corner of his mouth, while blathering to His Majesty who was about to remount and get on his way back to the relative warmth and comfort of his castle.

  “Sire! Sire!” he said, bowing and scraping while from the other side of his smiling face he summoned me. “Where are you, girl? Come here! Come here! Sire, may I introduce you . . . she’s just coming . . . here in a moment . . . to, yes, here she is . . . (straighten your dress, girl) . . . my daughter, Your Majesty. My daughter, Claraminda Griselda.”

  My father held me in front of him by my shoulders, his fingers digging into my flesh in his excitement. The King looked at me and smiled a vague, royal smile. Frankly, I wasn’t the prettiest girl a king had ever laid eyes on. Not ugly you understand, but nothing really special. He was again about to turn and go when my agitated father, seeing no light in His Majesty’s eyes, let out a strangulated sound, a screech not unlike the sound of a debtor’s name being marked on the slate.

  “Your Majesty!”

  And the King turned at the urgency of his cry. My father now had to think up the rest of the sentence. But “thinking” isn’t a good description of what he did.

  “Your Majesty, this is no ordinary girl. No mere miller’s daughter, Sire. No, she is a remarkable child. Not just dutiful and clever, though she is that, of course, but something more, much much more . . .”

  We all waited to see how my father would complete his babblings. I supposed madness mixed with insatiable greed came to the rescue.

  “This child, this young woman, Your Majesty . . . has an extraordinary gift . . . given to no one else. You see, Sire, she can . . . she has the ability . . . gained from God himself, it must have been . . . she can . . . spin . . . straw into . . . gold.”

  There was an astonished silence while my father stared at the King, his eyes bugging almost out of his head as he himself heard the preposterous thing he had said. Everyone else looked at him: the King, myself, the whole retinue. I thought for a moment that the King was going to have my father arrested for ridiculousness, but when I dragged my eyes away from my demented creator and took in His Majesty, I saw his expression change from disbelief at what he was hearing to something very like my father’s when someone came to him to put themselves deeply in his debt. I saw the King’s eyes glaze over with lust at the idea of monstrous wealth and power.

  “Your Majesty . . .” I said, trying to think of something to excuse my father and prevent him from being thrown into the country’s deepest, blackest dungeon for the rest of his life. I did not love my father, but still I felt that the blood between us was enough to make me want to try and salvage his life.

  “Be quiet, girl!” my father shouted, though he needn’t have bothered; I couldn’t think of a thing to say that might mitigate the nonsense he had spoken.

  His Majesty turned his head to me, and the former complete lack of interest in the plain miller’s daughter was transformed, as if my fairy godmother had waved a wand and made me the most exquisite maiden in the land. I immediately understood my position, and a shiver of despair ran through me. I was locked between the gaze of two avaricious men, each of whom saw me as the means vastly to improve his own standing. What hope had I, imprisoned between the hungry stares of father and king? It was as if a sentence of death had already been pronounced on me, before His Majesty ever said a word.

  “Is that so, miller?” the King finally said, never taking his eyes off me for a second. “Straw into gold, you say?”

  A look of fear crossed my father’s face, as for the first time he realised what would happen to him (never mind me, of course) when his ludicrous boast was proved to be a lie.

  “Your Maj . . .” he began, but what could he say to retrieve the situation? The words had flown from his mouth and nothing would make them unsaid.

  Funnily enough, the King did not think to ask me about my unusual skill. Nobody thought to say anything to me at all. You could see the King wavering between his eagerness for such a thing to be true—because if so, he would be the beneficiary of a treasure beyond the dreams even of kings—and the thought that he was being made a fool of. There was nothing he liked less than people trying to make a fool of him; just the idea put him into an executionary frame of mind. You could see his weighing up the benefits and the risks of believing my father. You might say that my father’s story was so preposterous that no one could give a second’s credence to what he said. But that would be to
underestimate the power of greed. Our future, my father’s and mine, hung in the balance, as the seconds passed. Our very lives depended on the King being as avid a greedy fool as my father. It was all we could hope for.

  The King stared dangerously at my father when he spoke again.

  “Well, let us see, miller, what wonders this daughter of yours can perform. I will take her to my castle, and if she can indeed turn straw into gold, then I will marry her. If not, the pair of you will die so that the world can see I am not a monarch to be fooled with.”

  Now, it has probably crossed your mind that it’s a damn strange thing for a girl to become a wife purely on the grounds of being able to spin straw into gold. She could become your banker, yes, but why a wife? Of course, it has to do with the needs of the structure within which we were all of us imprisoned—the story. That’s how it goes in this corner of the narrative world: the prize for doing the impossible is to become the wife of a king. Nothing to be done about that. Not even the fact that I cherished the idea of this particular king for my husband as much as I cherished the idea of my father being my father. But we have no choice, characters such as we. Nor could I, given my lack of regard for His Majesty, decide to sit in his palace and flatly refuse to change his straw into gold (if I could have done so, which common sense would tell you I couldn’t), preferring to die than live out a miserable life as queen. Like the circular life of the village, I was caught up in a pattern, though this pattern was a great deal less to my liking than the everyday life of the world I inhabited.